Just days after Holocaust Memorial Day, when the world commemorated the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it has emerged that Berlin's Holocaust Memorial has been used for a highly inappropriate purpose by members of the public. In the first few months after it opened in May 2005, the memorial in Berlin's city center was used as a public urinal.

The memorial -- officially known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- is made up of 2,711 concrete slabs, each 95 centimeters apart, and set in an area 19,000 square meters, the size of three football fields. It lies just next to the historic Brandenburg Gate and has many dark passages separating the slabs, that are barely visible from the exterior. It seems that many tourists and passers-by availed of this relative privacy to relieve themselves in a place that is intended to commemorate the fate of Europe's Jews under the Nazis. The memorial, which cost €25.3 million to build, has been seen as a major success, attracting 3.5 million visitors in its first year alone.